Hamas’s rocket force commander killed, Iron Dome’s effectiveness impresses
There are three things we should take note of after three days of war:
1. Hamas has more, better rockets and missiles
Since the last round between Israel and Hamas — Operation Pillar of Cloud (aka Pillar of Defense), 14-22 November 2012 – Hamas has added thousands of rockets and missiles to its arsenal. These rockets may be divided into two types:
- Rockets manufactured in Iran and smuggled into the Gaza Strip through Sudan, Somalia, and the Sinai Peninsula
- Rockets produced indigenously by Hamas
Israeli intelligence estimates that the number of rockets in the hands of Hamas is as follows:
- About 400 rockets with a range of up to 80 km (these rockets may reach Tel Aviv and Jerusalem). These are Iranian Fajr-5 rockets (North Korea helped Iran manufacture these rockets). These rockets have a warhead of up to 90 kg of high explosives. Hamas also is in possession of M-75 rockets, produced in Hamas plants in Gaza, with a range of 75 km.
- A few thousand rockets with a range of up to 40 km. Many of these rockets are China-made.
- A few thousand of rockets with a 20 km range. This category includes Russian-made Grad-122, anti-tank rockets such as iPG-7 and PG-29, and anti-tank missiles such as the AT-4, AT-4i, and AT-5.
Israel’s last three major military rounds against terrorist organizations — the first one with Hezbollah (the Second Lebanon War — 12 July-14 August 2006), the last two with Hamas (Operation Cast Lead — 27 December 2008-18 January 2009); Operation Pillar of Defense, aka Pillar of Cloud (14-22 November 2012) – each began with a surprise, and massive, Israel Air Force (IAF) attack.
The 2006 and 2012 wars were especially important operationally from Israel’s point of view:
- The first thirty-four minutes of the 2006 war saw the IAF destroy about two-thirds of Hezbollah’s mid-range missiles. Hezbollah continued to fire about 100 rockets a day into Israel until the end of the war, but could not meaningfully threaten Israel’s major population centers.
- In the first hour of Operation Pillar of Defense, the IAF destroyed most of Hamas’s Iran-made mid-range rockets and their launchers, preventing Hamas from targeting Israel’s population centers to the north and east.
The current operation – Operation Solid Rock, which began Monday night – lacks this element of a surprise IAF attack on Hamas’s mid-range rocket capability. Hamas has also learned from previous rounds: the missiles are kept in tunnels and underground bunkers under civilian residencies and public buildings such as hospitals, schools, and mosques. Many of the launch sites are covered underground dug-outs in residential areas: even if Israel wanted to begin this round with a surprise aerial strike against Hamas’s mid-rage launch capability – and had precise information about the location of these missiles and launch sites — it would have had to inflict major damage on civilian areas and kill many civilians in order to achieve that goal.
This means that this time around, Hamas will be able to launch rockets – many rockets — at Israel’s population centers, which it has already done: one of its rocket fell in an empty field near Binyamina (as it happens, the birthplace of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert), about 150 km north of the Gaza Strip. This is the farthest point ever hit by a Hamas rocket.
The seventy or so mid-range rockets Hamas has so far launched against Israel’s large urban areas have failed to reach their target because of the effectiveness of Israel’s Iron Dome defense system, but Hamas has begun the current round of hostilities with about 400 of these mid-range missiles, so Israel must brace for many more attacks on its main cities.
2. Israel’s strategy
Israel was dragged into this round rather than initiate it, and it lacked the kind of intelligence information about the location of Hamas’s mid-range missiles it had in 2012 (and in 2006 in the case of Hezbollah). As a result, Israel appears to be following a different strategy than it did against Hamas in 2012 and 2009, but similar to the one it followed against Hezbollah in 2006 (minus the initial surprise attack on Hezbollah’s mid-range missiles).
In addition to destroying tactical targets like missile launch sites, most of the targets Israel has attacked so far have been infrastructure targets: Israel’s goal is the destruction of every government building, police station, military base, training facility, arms depot, industrial plant, and also bridges, roads, and other infrastructure facilities. This is a similar tactics to the one Israel followed in 2006 against Hezbollah: a methodical destruction of the infrastructure in the Shi’a areas of southern Lebanon and southern Beirut.
Israel’s destruction of Shi’a infrastructure – built with Iranian funds – was so thorough, the Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said after the war that had he known that the price Hezbollah would pay for killing three Israeli soldiers – a killing which triggered the 2006 war – he would not have ordered the killing.
It should also be noted that Hezbollah appears to have absorbed the lesson of 2006, and for the last eight years the Israel-Lebanon border has been quiet. Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist, called this “The morning after the morning after” effect: In the immediate aftermath of the 2006 war, Nasrallah declared that Hezbollah had won the war. This was, Friedman wrote, the morning after. Surveying the destruction brought on the Lebanese Shi’as during that war, realizing the high cost Hezbollah and the Shia population paid for strating the war, and deciding that the cost was too high — this is the morning after the morning after.
Israel has thus decided to weaken not only Hamas’s military capabilities in order to make it more difficult for the organization to pursue its war plans, but make it much more difficult for Hamas to govern the Gaza Strip after hostilities cease by destroying Gaza’s — and Hamas’s — infrastructure.
This strategy is also dictated by the fact the Hamas is using the Palestinian population as human shield by placing its rockets in tunnels and bunkers under civilian residencies and public buildings such as schools, hospitals, and mosques, and by locating many of its rocket launch sites – in many cases, covered dug-out – near civilian buildings.
The calls in some quarters in Israel for a land invasion of the Gaza Strip stems from the recognition that Hamas’s clever human-shield tactics prevents the IDF from destroying Hamas’s military capabilities, including rocket production facilities, from the air without killing many more Palestinian civilians.
3. The political context
Israel has a good military, but there is no military solution to the conflict with Hamas – or, for that matter, Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. This may be put differently: there is no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at a price which Israel would be willing to pay, and with tactics Israel would be willing to pursue. If there were a military solution, it would entail the kind of tactics used by Russia in Chechnya and by Sri Lanka against the Tamil Tigers, that is, indiscriminate – literally indiscriminate – killing of civilians in an effort to defeat the adversary.
As Prime Minister Netanyahu correctly noted, “Israel cannot do what the Russians did in Chechnya.”
Thus, unless Israel makes the painful decision to become more accommodating to the legitimate demands of moderate Palestinians like Muhammad Abbas and the Palestinian Authority – painful, because such an accommodation would entail removing settlements and settlers from areas in the West Bank in order to allow a Palestinian state to emerge — Israel will find it difficult to isolate and effectively fight and defang Palestinian extremists such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The gains by ISIS in Iraq and Syria have raised even more the concerns among moderate Arabs about the threat posed by Islamist extremists. This means that Israel will find allies in the Arab world and among Muslims in its own war against local Islamists – and, to an extent, it already has such allies in Jordan and in Egypt under Sisi – if it recognized and accommodated Palestinian legitimate demands for self-determination.
